Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Microsoft announce the public release of a new developer tool - Source Analysis for C#.

Inside Microsoft this tool's name is StyleCop and it enforces code style guidelines on the code we write

Source Analysis comes with a set of default rules analyzers covering approximately 200 best practice rules. These rules are full compatible with the default layout settings in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

Specifically, these rules cover the following, in no particular order:

Layout of elements, statements, expressions, and query clauses

Placement of curly brackets, parenthesis, square brackets, etc

Spacing around keywords and operator symbols

Line spacing

Placement of method parameters within method declarations or method calls

Standard ordering of elements within a class

Formatting of documentation within element headers and file headers

Naming of elements, fields and variables

Use of the built-in types

Use of access modifiers

Allowed contents of files

Debugging text

After installation, Source Analysis can be run from within the Visual Studio IDE. You can set this up to be run as a part of your build process as documented here. Since this is plugged in as a MsBuild project you can use it in as a part of Team Foundation Build process as well.